KDilden

Always learning.

[KDilden @Readtravelthink]

@TBLW777 @travisakers Teacher here.
"to" should be "too".
You're still welcome, sweetie.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

🚨BREAKING: CNN’s top data analyst Harry Enten just dismantled Donald Trump’s presidency in real time, chart by chart, stat by stat.

From job losses to trade disasters to historic indictments, Enten lays it bare: Trump’s legacy isn’t greatness, it’s wreckage.

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

Time to spit some truth. Tariffs can't possibly make this $5 injection-molded spatula made in Vietnam or China a level-playing field. Why? Because the $2/hr Vietnam worker or $4/hr Chinese worker literally can't be made equal to the $35/hr US worker through a tariff; the math simply doesn't work. And China already uses the world's best automation, so the US can't make up the difference via higher productivity.

The only thing tariffs will do—and this isn't speculative, this will happen—is that if someone needs a spatula they'll now pay $7 for it (based on 50% tariffs and 20% Amazon margin). So a consumer will pay 40% more for that item, starting basically now.

Now, the reason no one is going to setup a spatula factory in the US is the same reason we shouldn't be tariffing spatulas: the US should not be producing them, and no one in their right mind will try.

There is a value curve in international economics, and poorer countries make cheap stuff and rich countries make expensive, complicated stuff. Just imagine trying to make spatulas in the US, even with state-of-the-art automation (the same the Chinese use): now your cheap plastic spatula will be $30.

This entire program is an act of strongman theater by people who have no intention of keeping these tariffs in place. Trump's team knows the US will be impoverished by moving down the value curve to compete with developing nations for stuff we shouldn't be producing in the first place.

So why do it? They're hoping that every nation blinks and eliminates their own tariffs, and that this magically creates American jobs. The problem with that, though, is twofold.

First, the economic carnage that is wrought while doing so could be catastrophic, as markets, asset values, investment, consumer spending and varied nation's policy replies generate a chaotic complex system that could very easily throw off all sorts of nonlinear black swans; they're playing with fire. If this doesn't get resolved soon, it's a guaranteed recession and wealth effect down-spiral.

Which brings me to the second reason tariffs are a problem: they play with fire here, but tariffs won't even work. The US's core economic problem isn't unfair trade, it is that it is rich, has fallen behind in the global economic value curve, and its prosperity is massively unequally distributed. These effects arise not because of unfair trade, but because as the global reserve currency our currency is overvalued relative to everyone else (esp China). Not to mention we've done a terrible job of investing in the education, innovation and productivity enhancement needed to remain competitive in the face of that GRC headwind. Yes, China needs to boost its domestic demand so as to soak up its excess savings that currently is being absorbed by US trade deficits, but the US has not done a single thing in 80 years to actually free itself from the yolk of being the GRC. Indeed, Trump and his team keep talking it up as if it's a source of power! It's not, it's the very disease that will inevitably choke us out, and not a single foreign nation has to fire a shot to do it.

Beyond the GRC, decades ago we gave up on our future: the U.S. historically led in innovation—DARPA, semiconductors, the Internet, biotech—but starting in the 1980s, there was a strong political shift away from public R&D and industrial policy in favor of neoliberal market ideology. Unsurprisingly, public R&D as a % of GDP has declined since the 1970s. The sad part is DOGE is doing it all over again as we speak, hollowing out our public R&D investments and talent and eliminating what little lead we still have, and MAGA is cheering them on. The lack of knowledge and self-awareness is almost inconceivable.

More, American education has been terrible. We have stagnant K–12 outcomes, especially in STEM, and underfunded schools. We've had skyrocketing college costs and student debt, and little investment in vocational training, apprenticeships, or mid-career up-skilling—areas where Germany, South Korea, and now China excel. Meanwhile, China massively invested in education, with rapid university expansion, heavy investment in STEM (over 4.7 million STEM grads/year vs ~0.6M in the U.S.), and deeply subsidized AI, robotics, advanced manufacturing and materials PhDs.

We want to even be in this conversation? Then we need to stop acting like petulant children, learn some basic facts about how the world actually works, and then get ready to compete for the future by laying down long-term, strategic investment in the core of the nation's capacities and which will take decades to come to fruition. If you think we're going to overcome 50 years of short-sighted policy and lack of truth-telling to the American people, lies that continue right up to this afternoon, than you should absolutely expect, with totally fair warning, that this only gets worse from here, and we'll have no one to blame but ourselves.

[KDilden @Readtravelthink]

@suptking We know that your heaviest decisions will unfailingly consist of what is best for the children and employees at JMCSS. ❤️

[Jonathan Allen @jonallendc]

In case anyone needs it, here are just a few of the places you can look to see where the money goes. There are many more.

https://t.co/qd2uC3hCVL
https://t.co/nsLz9hpdit
https://t.co/fPNfsK0KlM

[Dr. Angela Rasmussen @angie_rasmussen]

Giving infectious disease research a break, as promised by the MAHA agenda.

Let's break down what exactly this Executive Order is *really* saying. Fortunately, I speak fluent anti-vax grifterese & can translate.

https://t.co/3TjI4SZID2

[Anonymous @YourAnonCentral]

#Anonymous message to the people of the United States and Trump

[KDilden @Readtravelthink]

I'm tired, boss.

[KDilden @Readtravelthink]

@HalfwayPost He like an old, orange middle schooler.

[KDilden @Readtravelthink]

@Rick199677031 @EngineerBecky @LibertyCappy Nah...check receipts. We now export more oil more than Trump did. Domestic is at all-time high for production.

[Darshak Rana ⚡️ @thedarshakrana]

MIND-BENDING 🧠

1954: A scientist created a tank to "turn off" reality.

He stayed in it for 48 hours with:

• No light
• No sound
• No gravity

What he discovered haunts scientists to this day:

[Darshan 🦖 @darshan]

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this:

1. Follow me @darshan for more
2. Repost this thread if you found it helpful

[KDilden @Readtravelthink]

@msacks107 @tbonier @cmclymer Thank you, thank you, thank you. ❤️

[KDilden @Readtravelthink]

@8WithaTiara Tennessee, check. 💙

[George Takei @GeorgeTakei]

So tomorrow, if you stand with us and haven’t voted yet, I encourage, indeed implore you to do so. It’s a red alert moment, all crew to their battle stations. Help us win this fight, which is the same fight as ages past, but reimagined for 2024. Be a part of the winning side of history.

[philip lewis @Phil_Lewis_]

New Orleans students Ne’Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson, credited with solving the Pythagorean theorem using trigonometry, have discovered nine more solutions to the problem

https://t.co/2p7L9r1PUV

[@SaysDana @SaysDana]

Wow, just wow. I’ve been amazed again.
Watch it.

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

The American people are being gaslighted — and the bothsidesism of the mainstream media is shameful. Don't be fooled by the constant stream of disinformation by far-right fascists, the loathsome piece of shit is losing. Stay focused, y'all. We're in the home stretch. 🙌👏👊🌊🇺🇸